Changing my relationship to sickness (12 mins)
What do I want to carry forward into the next time my body is sick?
Whoa. That question. Those words.
This was the result of a text conversation with a friend during a recent bout of sickness that had a profound impact on the relationship with myself and being unwell.
Before I begin, being unwell, coping with sickness and illness of any kind is a unique and very personal journey for every single person. No-one has the right to tell someone else what they should feel or do when it comes to their own sickness or well-being. We all have our own unique rhythm, insights, and pace. It’s easy to blame and judge, and it’s easy to be critical of others.
The harder challenge is to have and hold compassion for someone, particularly when you don’t completely understand, or even agree with, the situation someone is in, or the choices they make.
With that said, the reason for sharing this personal account is with the intention of bringing more compassion into our own sickness journey for ourselves and for others.
As you read this, can you choose to find compassion for yourself when your body becomes sick in the future? Can you pick out elements from this article that will help you act more compassionately towards someone else who is experiencing sickness?
Flu came to visit
I’m on the recovery path from flu (not covid) which had me in bed for 5 days, in a dark room, feeling too hot and feverish (amidst a heat wave admittedly was not ideal), sweating, no energy, the room spinning, head thumping, eyes streaming, nose streaming, blocked ears, sneezing, mildly hallucinating, feeling delirious, and having body aches from head to toe... even my teeth ached. Apparently that’s a thing.
It was not a pleasant experience, but I also know my body and this is how it responds to flu. This is a familiar path for me when flu visits and it’s been the case for 20+ years.
This visit was no different than past experiences, as well the several gifts it delivered to me as part of the experience.
Since flu is something that visits my body from time to time. I know this about myself, and I know it’s a two-week journey; a week of being flat out, and a week of recovering gently. I have come to learn its my body’s way of processing stuff. Stuff it no longer needs, and it needs to heat up, detox, and get rid of the stuff physically and emotionally. It usually arrives after a particularly long period of intense work and / or personal situations, where my body has carried me well for a long period of time, and then it says, “No more, you need to rest. To bed with you!”. It’s true that if you don’t learn to listen to your own body it will start talking loudly to you - in the form of physical derailment.
Why do I get angry at myself for being sick?
Despite knowing flu is part of my life experience, I fight hard against flu (or any sickness) when it comes to visit.
I struggle with being unwell, I am not a patient patient.
As soon as I realize, after fighting it for a few days, that it really got me and I have to accept it and surrender to bed, all the thoughts begin…
“I have no time to be sick right now.”
“I’m a small business owner, I don’t have PTO or sick leave, I literally can not stop working.”
“Other people are way sicker than me, just get going.”
“Who is going to do the work if I don’t.”
“I’m letting my team down.”
“We had all these lovely plans.”
“Now I have to cancel a bunch of meetings and social engagements. They’ll think I’m a flake.”
“Is this is beginning of the end of my earth life?” (Yep I’ll go there for a mild cold too.)
The thoughts are endless, the ping ponging never stops. Even with the life experience I’ve had of being sick and recovering many many times in the past, I apparently suffer amnesia from all these past experiences, and what happens for a period of time is that I get really frustrated and angry at myself for being sick.
And how does that show up in my behavior? Well, let’s just say you wouldn’t want to live with me during my early sick days. I need encouragement, reminders, and a lot of TLC. I’m still learning to give this to myself, but somehow keep forgetting how to when I’m sick. Talking more about how emotions lead to thoughts lead to behaviors lead to reality and experience is for another day.
The Relationship with My Body
Deep down, I know my body is always working in my favor. If it’s sick it’s taking care of me, it’s not fighting me.
I have a really great relationship with my body, we have been on some serious adventures together. My mind however likes to think it rules the roost, but my body will often course correct that.
Long ago I began learning how my body speaks - thanks to illness, family history, and serendipitously meeting the right people and the right time, combined together this created the opportunity to learn more about this concept of my body having it’s own language of communicating with me.
It’s incredible what my body teaches me. A wise friend once said, “Sarah stop living in your head, get back into your body.” Learning my body language hasn’t been and isn’t always straightforward, and sometimes just when I think I’ve got it, it’ll change things up. Just to keep me on my toes.
My body knows what it is doing. It has far more intelligence than my mind alone, and it is always working brilliantly to keep me in balance, to repair damage, to evolve, to grow, to heal, to recover, to give me the life I love living. When it comes to my body (and yours in fact too) The American Scientist says
“About 330 billion cells are replaced daily, in 80 to 100 days, 30 trillion will have replenished - the equivalent of a new you.”
That’s a pretty amazing fact about the human body, so recognizing its intelligence is critical in the journey of sickness too.
I know, from experience, that every single time I’m sick, without fail, I will learn something extraordinary about myself.
Call it a software upgrade if you will, my body flattens and reboots me when it’s trying to get my attention, or needs to rightsize, rebalance, or do something on my behalf that I have not consciously been able to do.
Yep, it might sound bananas if this is new to you, but this insight and perspective is incredibly powerful and it has changed my relationship to myself when enduring sickness.
Why not relax into being sick?
If I know all this, why do I not relax into being unwell and accept it graciously?
My mind will fight tooth and nail against me being sick, until eventually it stamps its feet and rolls over in disgust to relinquish, soften and give in. This can take a while, and while I’m in this state the feelings it generates are frustration, anger, fear, despair, shame, annoyance - yep all the really intense, low vibrating ones that no-one likes to bask in.
As a friend once shared, “Would you expect your kidneys or liver to bark commands at you and for you to follow those demands? Of course not, so why would you do that based on your mind and its thoughts?"
Good point.
Society’s relationship with sickness
Is the frustration I’m feeling derived in any way from society conventions we have developed? Well, probably, and here are some of the reasons why:
Mindset is key. It can tank us, or float us. The choice is ours. How we individually respond to ourselves when we are sick will fundamentally change our experience of sickness. How many times in your lifetime, when you have been physically sick, has anyone (expert or not) asked you about your mindset with regards to your sickness? If your experience is anything like mine “very very few” will be your answer. It’s unlikely growing up you were taught, or had the opportunity to learn, how to build your mind’s resiliency during sickness which is often coupled with pain, suffering and discomfort. What you have been taught, very successfully, is how to open a packet of pain remedies to quickly get rid of the suffering (acute or not) in any way you can.
Being sick is never expected. Birch Cove Collective member Russ Rausch talks about the power of “Expect the Expected”, he’s right. We know sickness is a very natural and common part of being human, and it is part of our life experience. So why act surprised and even get upset when it visits us? Why do we try to rush it through us and get back to whatever we view as standard life as quickly as possible. What if sickness has great life lessons for us? Do you want to pass those up?
Being sick always comes at the most inconvenient time. Yet, the reality is there is never a convenient moment to be sick. When it arrives, it is always the wrong time. So then, is it our relationship with sickness that is wrong, and not the timing? In our attempt to control our experience we look hurriedly around for ways out of sickness.
In society we’re not very patient or compassionate with ourselves or towards others when sickness visits - unless it’s really bad and/or we agree with the diagnosis. We say we have compassion, but in practice we rarely do. We still have so much to learn personally and professionally about our approach to and relationship with sickness and illness.
We often judge people by the degree of their sickness, which is unfair as we’ve learned more prominently in the past few years that people struggle with all sorts of definitions of sickness, illnesses and ailments, often behind closed doors. They rightly don’t have to share the details of what they’re going through with anyone just to earn the right for compassion. That’s a discussion for another day.
Culture is a big part of what creates sickness expectation. When I moved to the States in the mid 2000s I remember being surprised at how cavalier the whole approach to being sick seemed, particularly in business:
Keep working at all cost.
You have an allocated number of sick days for the year, but try not to use them please.
If you’re sick, go to the doctor, take some drugs and get back to working.
You’re sick? You’re weak.
Being European this blew my mind. I came from a different mentality. Why would you keep working if you’re sick? You’ll prolong your own sickness, unlikely to perform well, possibly even cause a work problem, or at worse a catastrophe, and you’ll potentially share your bugs with everyone else. No thank you, you’re sick go home, rest.
In time, my ignorance was replaced by learning more about American culture, and discovered that, as is often the case here, it all comes down to money. For many they will not be paid if they’re sick and off work, so taking time off work to recover is not practical and it puts people in impossible situations, giving them no choice but to work sick.
In general, there is also an outdated societal view that experiencing sickness means you’re weak. Mix that in with the theme of perceived entitlement, flakiness and lack of resiliency that gets waved around at people, particularly younger people, this all contributes to our collective societal view of sickness.
Put all of these elements together and you start to understand the kind of society environment we have created. I’m beginning to ease up on myself about being sick. Are we products of our environment, or is the environment a product of us? That’s a debate for another day.
Upgrade our view of sickness
Being sick is part of being human. Our bodies are not made for 24/7 living. We will experience sickness, it’s life. We need to learn how to unplug, and…
Our response to sickness is what matters.
Even after covid, there is still a keep going kind of mentality. The American population is sicker than it has ever been, and its health has been declining over years. In fact, America is now number 10 in the top 10 of unhealthiest countries in the world according to the MDLinx article and research on “What’s the healthiest country in the world?” written by Liz Meszaros. There are many reasons that contribute to this, yet that’s a story for another day.
Living a vibrant and exceptional quality of life is what long term health is about, not living with chronic disease propped up on drugs with an awful quality of life. Is that really what we are striving for? Hardly. Life is for living and finding ways to live a long vibrant life is high on our agenda.
Ask for help
During this bout of flu I learned something new about myself, I can ask for help and be specific about what I need.
In one particularly tough hour of frustration I reached out to a friend (Christina Wallis - a Birch Cove Collective member in fact). “I am so frustrated at being ill and I feel like I’m losing the progress I made. Any wise words?”
Well, did she deliver!
Among the very wise words she shared, she said “You’ll be sick again in your lifetime, and you can train yourself now to have a lighter touch and soften when the fighting words arise.”
This resonated.
She continued “If you connect to it deeply now, that connection will grow and will serve you very well when you are back to full throttle again. If you do this well now, you’ll be beautifully prepared for the next time. Sabotage this and the next time will still have its residue.”
Whoa. Every cell in my body responded to those words. She was right.
What can I do now in caring for myself, that will also support me the next time I’m sick?
What do I want to carry forward from this experience of being sick, into the next time my body is sick? These were the questions I began to let float around me.
How can I love my body more in this moment?
What will help me now that will also help me next time I’m sick?
What does resisting this do for me?
What gifts am I being given from this sickness?
In an instant the relationship I had with myself and being sick changed.
Based on this interaction and these words there was an immediate shift in my perception that rippled through into my thoughts, feelings and further into my actions.
My body soften, it was as if light had been switched on inside of me. A peacefulness washed over me and that night as I slipped into sleep there was a distinctive sense of calm running throughout my system. That calm ushered in a recovery rate that led to me feeling brighter the following morning and the realization that my healing journey had begun.
What I learned being sick this time?
There are always lessons to be learned in every aspect of life, and being unwell delivers no shortage. This time I was reminded that:
My body is always working for me, it is always working in my favor. I take care of it, and it takes care of me. I might not always choose the path it chooses, but I eventually surrender to it, and it’ll guide me through.
What does my body need when it’s sick; it needs its bed, rest, sleep (lots of it), water (lots of that too), virtually no phone except playing guided meditations or sleep stories (these two were regular favorites this time round: Physical Healing via Insight Timer, and Gratitude via Calm), no laptop, minimal interactions, nourishing foods (lots of green juice, veggies, and fruit, and organic homemade bread and toast seem to be a favorite), an occasional float in an epsom salt bath (when strength allows it), and cool air (since being in the States I have been so grateful for air conditioning, and I’ve never been more grateful for it during a 100F heatwave and being unwell.)
Asking for specific help is important, I am not good at asking, so this takes practice and it was a good lesson with wonderful results.
I was reminded, again, to trust the timing. I am where I am supposed to be. My body needs rest right now and I learned how to support its need.
Relearning time and time again to let the resistance go, accept what is. When I do, the whole experience is just that much more straightforward.
There is a silver lining to be sick, I might not be able to identify it in the moment, but it will be there and it’ll shine at some point in the future.
The Gift of Being Human
In summary, the overriding lesson is that after every sickness experience, I am different; I have transformed, been upgraded if you like, I approach life differently, and as a result these eight gifts are delivered:
I’ve been reminded of the importance and restoration of rest
Learned more about myself and my body
Been humbled
Experienced and let go of layers of fear
Experienced a greater sense of being human
Become more grateful for my life and the people in and around me that are part of my life
Learned (and relearned) how to give myself more grace in healing, recovering, and getting back to normal
I see myself and the world with more compassion
“Well then”, I say to myself, with such love, “How can you really be angry at yourself for being sick, when these are the gifts you receive as a result?”
Tell me about your response to yourself when you are sick? What have you learned through your sickness experiences? Share a comment below.
Be well, live intentionally
Birch Cove is not a medical or therapy based business, we do not offer guarantees of any kind. We are not responsible for the well-being of businesses or individuals that read, watch, or hear our content, or take part in sessions, or use our services or the services we highlight. Individuals are responsible and accountable for their own well-being. Birch Cove and our Collective members are not responsible for the physical and mental health and well-being of individuals we interact with directly or indirectly. We work to share best practices that inspire healthy living and revitalize a quality of life.